The proliferation of the World Wide Web through the Internet has made available a wealth of information with nearly instantaneous access time. Much of the information available is in multimedia (i.e., audio and/or video) format, including music tracks and news reports. The multimedia content may be completely dynamic, being updated daily, hourly, or even broadcast live.
It is often convenient to capture a selection of various tracks available over the Internet on a local portable media for later playback. With the availability now of writable compact discs (CDs) and the massive user base of CD players already in use, it would be desirable to provide a system and method for allowing a user to select and download various audio/visual tracks from the Internet and to record them directly onto a CD for later retrieval.
Depending on the size and format of the multimedia track, the bandwidth of the user's Internet connection, and the amount of traffic on the Internet at the time of download, the process required in visiting a service site, downloading a requested track, and listening to or watching the downloaded track may be time-consuming and/or inconvenient.
Accordingly, a need also exists for a system and method for selecting audio/video tracks from Internet multimedia service providers, automatically downloading the selected tracks, and writing the downloaded tracks to a CD for later retrieval by the user. It would also be convenient to provide a method for setting up a profile specifying the tracks and time desired, and having the CD created automatically without user intervention.